In the atelier, wood comes before flowers. Driftwood leaned against the wall, bamboo reaching almost to the ceiling, old timber waiting for the day it will become a work. A single pair of shears bites into a length of material on the diagonal, and makes a dry sound.
Kouen Yokoi is a shihan — a certified master — of the Sogetsu-ryu, the Sogetsu School, a young school within ikebana, only about a hundred years old, and she is its third generation. Her grandmother and her mother were both Sogetsu masters. But she herself decided to carry on this path only after losing her mother. Until then, she had studied spatial design at art school, worked in stage design, and dived as a scuba instructor.
This article means to follow ikebana from its history of more than a thousand years to the way a kenzan — a spiked metal frog that holds the stems — is set, to the story of a tool nearly forgotten. But at the root there is always one question: with flowers, what is she arranging?
Her grandmother was one of the eight disciples who founded the Sogetsu School together with its first iemoto (the head of the school). Her father was a stage director for dance; her maternal grandfather was a Noh actor of the Hosho-ryu, the Hosho School. Born into a family of performing artists, Yokoi, in her teens, pushed back against that lineage rather than embracing it.
Toguri: To begin, may I ask about the path that brought you here? From childhood, did you intend to go this way?
Yokoi: It was the opposite, in fact. Until I entered high school, I resisted my family. I seriously thought, "I want to make a household that isn't full of artists." In middle school and high school I felt, "I don't want anything to do with being an artist." Still, from childhood I was the apprentice at the temple gate, picking up what I was never formally taught — the practice room was my playground and the shears were my toys, so it had entered my body all the same.
Toguri: I've also heard that at one point you aimed to become a police officer. From there to art, and then to diving — your background is quite varied.
Yokoi: I happened to join the art club in high school with a friend, and as I painted in oils and made sculptures, I felt, "Making things is fun." It reminded me that I'd been good at art since elementary and middle school, and so I went straight on to a prep school for the art university entrance exam. After graduating, I worked as a spatial designer, doing stage sets and displays. Diving I really started just for fun. But underwater, you're so free. The body moves so freely there. And in the water, primary colors spill over everything, as if a box of crayons had been turned upside down. I was drawn to the beauty of those colors, and I kept at it.
The turning point was her mother's death.
Yokoi: Among the things my mother left behind was a line: "the one who inherits kurenai." Kurenai is the character for deep crimson, the single character handed down through our names — my grandmother, my mother, and me. When I saw it, the feeling that "I have to carry this on" rose up in me properly.
Toguri: Before that, you hadn't intended to succeed her?
Yokoi: Teaching oil painting for fun somehow turned into work. My mother asked me, "Why you?" but I said, "I like teaching things I enjoy, so let me," and she let me carry on. But I only truly received it after she passed away. Taking it on, honestly, frightened me. My mother had around a hundred and fifty students. And several dozen of them had known me since I was a baby. I really thought, this is impossible. I bowed my head to them and said, "I'm sorry — if you'll allow it, please let me continue." That is where I began.
Ironically, the first thing she ran into after taking over was "the basics." For someone who had known ikebana as play, the system for teaching beginners the first steps was not in her head.
Yokoi: For half a year, I drilled it into myself thoroughly. I didn't even know the names of the plants. I brought a flower dictionary, went to the practice room early, looked each one up — "what flower is this?" — and prepared in case a student asked, getting through it one session at a time. But large-scale spatial work was the one thing I was never afraid of from the start. Even when asked to build a bamboo grove on a stage, I had always handled large things. If anything, I can move like a space director. That may be where I differ from other teachers.
Her unusual starting point, though, was at once her weakness and her weapon. An eye that designs a whole space — that is what would later set her ikebana apart from the rest.
Ikebana is often summed up in a single phrase: "quiet Zen." But the history Yokoi tells is more raw, more political, and rooted in handwork.
Toguri: Where and when did ikebana begin in the first place?
Yokoi: In fact, flowers already appear in the Kojiki. Peach, and lily too. The lily is native to Japan, after all. People in old Japan went on simply admiring flowers right up until the Heian era. That changed when Buddhism came in. Flowers that until then had been thrown in, tossed into a vessel, came to be "stood up." This is rikka (lit. "standing flowers"). You may take it that it began, originally, from offering flowers to the gods.
Toguri: When was it established as a style?
Yokoi: The Muromachi period. The Muromachi shoguns, in Kyoto, raised ikebana, incense, and tea from things of daily life to "art" one rank above. The reason Japanese today feel that ikebana or tea is "a little forbidding" is probably a trace left from that time.
What settled the style was the appearance of the tokonoma — an alcove, a space set a step higher in the tatami room, where flowers and hanging scrolls are displayed. In that place, where high-ranking vessels and implements were set, rikka grew. Through the Azuchi-Momoyama period, the patronage of the daimyo sustained it. As Toyotomi Hideyoshi protected the Ikenobo, the Ikenobo School, ikebana became an accomplishment of warlords and, along with tea and incense, remained "something for those at the top."
Yokoi: In the Edo period, it finally became something for ordinary people. In a peaceful age without war, commoners spread the culture. Even so, it was still a man's pursuit. Women taking it up begins, more or less, in the Edo period. And what was technically significant was the Meiji-era kenzan — a metal tool set with needles, into which flower stems are inserted and held. Before that, rikka was inserted into a bundle of straw. The original form of the kenzan is straw — I often tell my students this. Rikka takes me nearly a day and a half to arrange, even now. Thanks to the kenzan, it became possible to arrange quickly, in ten or twenty minutes.
In the Meiji era, foreign culture and foreign flowers flowed in, and new schools were born one after another. By Yokoi's account, the schools now number more than two hundred.
Yokoi: Ikebana has no Living National Treasures. There are too many schools; even an iemoto is not a Living National Treasure. Once things could be transmitted by text rather than by kuden (oral transmission), schools multiplied — "here's how I would do it." From Meiji through Taisho and into the early Showa era was when they increased the most.
And there is one more change she wants, above all, to put into words. It concerns the postwar years.
Yokoi: This is a very sad thing — but after the war, Japan's traditional culture was shifted from something that sought artistry to "a part of daily life." Make it easy, let it blend into everyday living. I think that had its good side, too. But little by little, it became impossible to teach that "continuing matters." The practice of passing on what one received from one's master to the next hand grows thinner and thinner.
She speaks of this feeling through a concrete recent episode. It is her own reading of events, but the impression is strong.
Yokoi: During the pandemic, the Agency for Cultural Affairs said it would provide subsidies to people working in culture. I did a thick stack of paperwork — about a hundred and thirty pages — and at the very end, when I read the proviso, it said, "excluding flower arrangement, calligraphy, incense, tea, and go and shogi." Aren't we culture? There are people who make a living only by teaching flowers, only by making works, and yet we weren't recognized by the Agency for Cultural Affairs — that unsettled me for six years. When I later asked someone at the Agency directly, they said, "Complaints came from various quarters, so we removed it right away." But they didn't answer why it had been written in the first place. If even Japan's own Agency for Cultural Affairs thinks that way, I find myself wondering whether the classical arts will go unprotected from here on and decline.
She brings out an image from fruit trees. Momo-kuri san-nen, kaki hachi-nen — peach and chestnut trees bear fruit in three years, persimmons in eight — a proverb that counts the years from sprouting to fruit.
Yokoi: It has a continuation: citron takes eighteen years, and apple takes twenty-five years to bear fruit. Which means this is a world that doesn't hold together unless you continue it as a family, as a lineage. To connect what has been linked generation to generation on to the next generation — that, I think, is really what lies at the very bottom of Japanese culture.
Ironically, it is often people from outside the country, she says, who look most intently at that value.
Yokoi: People from abroad hold great respect for Japanese culture — for the fact that it has continued for hundreds of years. Starting from Ikenobo, there is a history of more than seven hundred years. In some cases, that is longer than the history of their own country. I feel they respect the very act of studying one thing continuously. And more than we Japanese tend to think, people from abroad mix various parts of Japanese culture together and think about it freely.
That ikebana grew within the frame of the tokonoma; and that Sogetsu is a school that stepped outside that frame. This single point leads, in the next chapter, into the core of her thinking.
What is the difference from Western flower arrangement? — it is also the question Yokoi first puts to those who come to the experience. Her whole way of thinking is contained in the answer.
Toguri: How do flower arrangement and ikebana differ?
Yokoi: The Western style is truly lovely, too. It is a world that uses flowers, uses plants, to show the flowers themselves as beautiful. The flower is beautiful — that's the point. But those of us who do ikebana — because Japan is a small country, our thinking and our spirit deepen inward and inward, and become, I suppose, a "universe." I want you to use plants to make a space. The space between one flower and another — this space is beautiful, isn't it. That is when you first come to hold an awareness of "space." That, I believe, is ikebana.
Toguri: This is a difficult question, but how do you bring invisible space, the beauty of air, down into expression?
Yokoi: That is probably something you continue for a lifetime. There are kata, forms, but in the end it is a struggle with yourself. The sensibility that says, by placing one leaf here, this space becomes beautiful — that you must go on studying your whole life. Still, take a Japanese person: on a middle-school trip they're taken to Kyoto and look at a karesansui dry garden, thinking it a bother. In that moment, I think something like an awareness of space is planted in them, below the surface. Everyone holds that power latently, so I tell them, "This is a place where you can express it."
Onto the words "a lifetime of study," she layers a single scene.
Yokoi: A teacher past eighty, who had begun Sogetsu around the same time as my grandmother, at a convention twenty years ago, bowed her head to a young iemoto about the age of her own grandchild and said, "I still have much to learn from here on, so please guide me." I want to be like that. People like us — I believe it is a lifetime of study.
This sense of "arranging space" overlaps with the very origins of the Sogetsu school itself.
Yokoi: What my mother and the previous iemoto often said was, "Sogetsu is what stepped outside the tokonoma." The tokonoma has a back. You don't have to mind being seen from behind. At most, it assumes you are seen from forty-five to ninety degrees at the front. But having stepped outside of that connects directly to this: it may be seen from every direction, so make it look good from wherever it is seen. That is why Sogetsu works not only in the tokonoma but anywhere. You may even hang it from the ceiling. That flexible teaching was there in the text from the very beginning. Now I am very grateful for it.
Her thinking about space extends to color as well. What she favors is black. Once, while teaching in Vladivostok, that black gave rise to an unexpected misunderstanding.
Yokoi: I was in black top and bottom, wearing black sunglasses, and it seems I was taken for someone suspicious. Two people or so kept following behind me. When I asked, they said, "You're suspected of being mafia." Over there, black is a gangster's color. But what's interesting is that people from abroad who study Japanese culture feel black as mu, emptiness. When I was using a black vessel, someone asked, "Sensei, does this mean 'mu'?" I answered, that's exactly right. We Japanese feel color in black, and something like the weight of air. They see "nothing there." Both are correct.
So if she is not arranging flowers, what is she arranging? One answer was "omotenashi," hospitality; another was "mu."
Toguri: For you, what is the essence of ikebana?
Yokoi: It's omotenashi, truly. When a friend comes and flowers are displayed, no one looks at them and gets angry. Everyone smiles. It's the same with cherry blossoms, isn't it. People who usually look down at their phones look up only at cherry-blossom time, smiling with good faces. A life involved with flowers is a happy one, I always think. The biggest reason I keep doing ikebana is probably omotenashi.
Toguri: You often use the phrase "a sense of spaciousness in the mind."
Yokoi: It's precisely the busy ones who often come to practice. People like that, more than anyone, become "mu" while facing the flowers. The head empties out, there is only the struggle between the flowers and yourself, and a time comes when you forget everything else. Everyone takes on a very good face. This is where I'm glad I worked as a scuba instructor — underwater, you had to grasp another person's state of mind with your eyes alone. That sense helps me now in practice, too. I understand what everyone is thinking as if I could take it in my hand. So although I like expressing things myself, I think the master's role is to teach while sharing one interesting exchange after another with each person.
There is one more way that runs through her making: a stance, ingrained in her days as a spatial designer, of reading "what the other person wants."
Toguri: When you make a work, what are you thinking about?
Yokoi: After art school, in corporate work, I learned to read what the client wanted, and that carries through to now. Not "this is how I want to present it," but "what does the other person want." For a stage production or a film, I first ask them to send me the script. How the scene connects to what comes before and after, and what kind of flowers are called for. When I was asked for the flowers for a kabuki production, I said, "I'm sorry — please wait three years; I'll study in the meantime," and I went to Ikenobo to build a foundation and study the historical setting. Some people will arrange, in a Heian-era scene, flowers that didn't exist in the Heian era. That is where I want to do it properly. While I'm making something, what I'm thinking about is, if anything, less the client than "the world of the story." What will look good in this space. I choose the vessel, too, to suit that space. I suppose I like the collaboration between space and flowers.
Even Sogetsu's expression, which looks free, is by no means "anything goes" within her.
Yokoi: Even living freely, I think the school matters enormously. The basics matter most. I would never make light of the school. Whether Sogetsu or Ikenobo, it properly begins with a greeting. That is something I don't want to drop. Precisely because there is something to pass on, I want the next generation to learn the old Japanese techniques of arranging properly.
There are words of the first iemoto that she heard from her mother.
Yokoi: "If there are no flowers, arrange water; if there is no water, arrange earth." It's a teaching to arrange even when there is nothing — to arrange as though out of mu. In fact, even without flowers, just filling a vessel with water makes it look good. When I say, "try filling it taut, to the surface tension," that alone becomes a study of water. Earth, too, takes on many shapes when you knead it. You can arrange anything, use anything — that is where the interest of flowers lies.
"You can use anything." This one phrase connects straight to the very materials she arranges. Next is the story of driftwood, the kenzan, and a tool nearly forgotten.
The idea of "arranging as though out of mu" takes concrete shape in her choice of materials. Picking up what has been thrown away and giving it life once more. The world calls this "eco ikebana," but for her the order is reversed.
Toguri: You often use driftwood and old timber. It's sometimes spoken of in the context of the SDGs — what was the reason you arrived there?
Yokoi: The SDGs, honestly, are something added on afterward. When I go to a dam, there are things lying around that thrill me. "It would be interesting to hang this from above" — a picture comes into my head. I'll call out to the logging workers, "May I take this?" Demolition timber from old houses, too, is treasure to me. If I can give something once discarded even a little life again, by my own hand, that would be good — that's what I think.
In the moment of arranging, she says, she is often speaking to the material.
Yokoi: It's different when I'm matching a basic form, but when I arrange freely, it's possible I'm arranging while talking to the flowers. "Which part is good?" "Which direction do you like?" Where I place it, how it will look. A flower has a front and a back, and a direction it wants to face. I arrange while watching for that.
Once the material is decided, next is the tools. Among ikebana's tools, the one Yokoi says foreigners find hardest to obtain is the kenzan. But what she most wants to talk about are the shears, and one tool that almost no one knows.
Yokoi: There are various shears, too. Because we cut wood, these — shears with a ring for your fingers — the ring catches and gets in the way. So schools that cut wood use a simple, ringless form. We call this warabi-gata, shaped like the curled shoot of a young bracken fern. Schools that cut grasses may have the ring. The way of using them is set, too: don't open your elbow, close it. Hold the material parallel and cut on the diagonal. Cut on the diagonal and it cuts easily.
Toguri: And for flowers, is the way of cutting different again?
Yokoi: Only the chrysanthemum is different. The chrysanthemum is said to dislike blades, so it is cut by hand. This is passed down by kuden, by oral transmission.
Then she takes out an old tool whose shape, she says, hasn't changed since the Showa era. At first glance like a syringe, it was a tool for mizuage, drawing water up into cut stems.
Yokoi: This is called a mister, but with it you force water into a hollow stem like a lotus's. A "forced water attack," you might say. A stem that had gone limp revives with this. It's really interesting. It works for mizuage. Once, when I ordered lotus from a florist, they told me, "The water wouldn't rise, so we threw them out." "No, no — you do mizuage with this," I said. But teachers who know this tool have dwindled quite a lot. The only ones who buy it are probably my students. That is exactly why I hope this tool will be carried on.
Tools also hold the memory of inheritance. A pair of shears bearing her grandmother's name — forged by a Living National Treasure shear-smith — she keeps on display, unused.
Yokoi: There is a form of shears that carries my grandmother's name. I can't use them as I am now. I'm afraid to. Being such an unworthy grandchild, I only keep them on display, but even so they hold meaning for me.
Such "things not in the text," she passes to her students deliberately.
Yokoi: Because I learned the old family forms from my mother, there are many special assignments. But sadly, they aren't in the Sogetsu text. So teachers who don't know them keep increasing. Long ago, when I was doing a certain old form as a matter of course at my teacher's place, a teacher from the neighboring branch asked me, "What are you doing?" I was startled that she didn't know it. Left alone, these will simply disappear. So with my students, I talk through "why this is needed" and "why it is this way," and I tell them to do it until it becomes a habit, and have them practice it.
Preparation, she says, takes up most of the work.
Yokoi: Just before putting out a work, it begins with spraying lacquer on the driftwood at home. If a neighbor saw it, they'd think it was just a construction shop. When I load the materials into the car, it's packed so full I can't see behind me at all, and whatever won't fit I tie onto the roof rack. I spend two or three days on preparation; for a single work, preparation is eighty to ninety percent. The performance itself is really a matter of ten or twenty percent.
When the tools and materials overflowed, they changed the very place she lived. And across the sea, to an unexpected land, her flowers travel too.
Toguri: What are your home and atelier like?
Yokoi: I originally had a house in Chigasaki, but the driftwood and bamboo spilled out of the house and became a nuisance to the neighbors. So now I live a little further out in the countryside — in a house with a room for the driftwood and the bamboo.
For film work, a workspace just for her was set up at a studio lot in Kyoto.
Yokoi: They carried all my things — the driftwood and everything — and built me a workspace of about six tatami mats. Shelves put in, vessels lined up. In the cold of winter, there were stretches when I arranged there alone, all by myself in the studio. The Kyoto craftsmen are strict; for two or three weeks, no one says a thing to you. You don't know whether it's good or bad. But I was taught, "Saying nothing means it's fine." When the lighting man, the one I'd feared most, finally said "zesei" — no corrections needed — I was truly glad. From then on I grew very close with everyone on set.
The set sharpened her knowledge of history, too. In one period drama, an actor was suddenly to arrange flowers in a scene that wasn't in the script, and she guided a person who had never held shears, starting from a very small work. It would be wrong to arrange, in an Edo scene, flowers that didn't exist in Edo. In a work from another year, set in the early Showa era, she was asked for "Sogetsu's sharpest, most cutting-edge flowers," and she checked, one by one, whether unusual materials had existed in the Japan of that time. Historical accuracy is, for her, a part of ikebana.
But the farthest her flowers have ever traveled was to the Pacific island of Palau.
Toguri: May I also ask about your activities in Palau?
Yokoi: I originally went for diving. When I went to eat at a restaurant run by a Japanese owner, the location was superb, yet there was a strangely "off," hollow space. When I asked, "Are you going to make something here?" they said there was nothing yet. "If you like, I'll make it," I said, and three months later I went again, cut materials from around there, assembled it with the cook, and made a large object. People in Palau saw it and asked, "Who made this?" "It's Japanese ikebana." From there, talk of "wanting to learn ikebana" spread.
In that Palau, for a single day, she crossed to Peleliu Island. It is a fierce battlefield of the Second World War, a place where many lives were lost.
Yokoi: From the boat, the island looked pink. As if cherry blossoms were in bloom. I thought it might be nothing more than my own imagining. What I learned later was that this island's last transmitted message had been "the cherry blossoms fall." Cherry blossoms bloom all at once and scatter right away, don't they. So in the war, that was what they called the young soldiers dying at the front. And so I thought, "I have to bring cherry blossoms to this island." Cherry trees don't bloom in Palau, so a deep red flower that blooms in April, a relative of the hibiscus, is called the "Palau cherry," planted at the elementary school, and everyone holds a flower-viewing. I bring Japanese artificial cherry blossoms and have them hold a Japanese hanami, a flower-viewing. That was the beginning of cherry blossoms connecting Japan and Palau.
When she visited again after three years, following the pandemic, it was made possible by crowdfunding. The island's people still call her "Sensei" — a Japanese word that has remained on the island just as it is.
Yokoi: This time they gathered many elementary schoolchildren for me. Ikebana is a little difficult for children, so I used what was in Palau — bamboo, white sand, and moss. I split the bamboo in half, put white sand in it, and said, "Let's do an ikebana of water." A little karesansui, really. When I said, "This is the ISLAND, and here is the WAVE," everyone enjoyed it enormously. It was popular with the children, so I want to continue it from here on.
To arrange an island and waves out of bamboo, sand, and moss — it was the most plain, most pure practice of the "arranging space" idea she speaks of in Japan.
What is prepared for the experience is surprisingly little. A shallow basin, a kenzan, warabi-gata shears. And a few branches, and about three flowers. From the very starting point, it is the reverse of Western arrangement, which keeps adding more.
Toguri: How do you teach those doing it for the first time?
Yokoi: First, I have them experience the trinity called tenchijin — Heaven, Earth, and Man, the three elements. To begin, one line reaching toward Heaven. I say, "Find a good man — tall and slender, with a small head." You stand it up toward Heaven. For size, take the width of the vessel plus its depth, and one and a half times that is the basic measure. This is the lead role. The supporting role is three-quarters of that length, tilted a little toward you. Insert it straight into the kenzan, put strength into your fingertips, and tilt it firmly toward your own side. This makes Heaven and Earth.
Toguri: And the flowers — how do you place them?
Yokoi: A flower has a front and a back. Imagine the sun above your own head, I tell them, and make a triangle. Tilt the flower toward your left shoulder, and an isosceles triangle forms. This is the foundation of our ikebana. What's interesting is that the West, too, has the triangle of the golden ratio. The triangle is probably a beautiful form across cultures.
From here on is the world of what she calls "subtraction."
Yokoi: To the viewer, the kenzan ends up in full view. So we "conceal the kenzan" — tilt a longer stem forward, make three dimensions look like two, and erase the kenzan. Further, after making a triangle with the flowers, the last stem goes in a little lower, to let air pass through. So that air doesn't pool but passes through. And because the whole leans forward, you add depth at the back to pull it back. Seen from the side, it comes into balance. Finally, you shift the kenzan a little and let the water show. Here, space is born.
From the finished work, she further "subtracts" something.
Yokoi: Ikebana has something a little "minus" about it. The beauty of subtraction. When you take away the excess from a finished piece, little by little, air comes into view there. People from abroad are very surprised by this act of "taking away." Flower arrangement keeps adding flowers to make it beautiful. But Japanese ikebana is two branches and three flowers. To make a space with this fewness — those doing it for the first time are truly surprised. The hardest is ikka ichiyo — one branch, one flower. That, I think, may be the ultimate of Japanese ikebana.
What first surprises those in the experience, Yokoi says, is usually the kenzan. Inserting flowers into a tool lined with needles is itself a first sensation for many people. Next, the fewness of materials. And then the reversal of thinking, that space is born by taking away rather than adding. When it comes time to choose the flowers themselves, another kind of time begins to flow.
Yokoi: In the practice I hold at a flower shop, when I say, "Choose the flowers you like yourself," everyone agonizes for about thirty minutes. It's fun to watch. Which flower is best for my assignment, how much will it cost. Including things like that — and the seasons; if you live in Japan, I'd like you to taste, along with it, the pleasure of living the seasons.
And even in the setting of the experience, she tries to hand over a nearly vanished skill.
Yokoi: To a woman who came the other day, I showed one of the special assignments — an old form called "Shoubu." Teachers who don't know this form have increased, and florists can no longer handle it either. As I did it, saying, "It's not a special form, but it's a task I want you to remember, so forgive me," she was very glad, saying, "This is what I wanted to study," "I'm glad I could learn something not in the text." Why we do this — including that very sense of "it's beautiful, isn't it." Together with techniques anyone can easily do, I want this to be a place where you can also learn those old Japanese ways.
Toguri: For those who come to the experience, what would you ultimately like them to feel?
Yokoi: Two branches and three flowers — with only this, you make one space in this place. I'd like them to think of it as a single stage, and to feel nature. Heaven and Earth, and oneself. Through the trinity, I hope they can experience that "here is the universe, here is the Earth."
To arrange not the flowers, but the space between one flower and another. To give discarded wood life once more. To pass on, mouth to mouth, the gestures that were never kept in the forms, into the next hands. Kouen Yokoi's work is staked not on adding, but on keeping and on subtracting.
That handwork cannot be grasped by words alone. The sound of the shears biting the material on the diagonal, the angle of the fingertips tilting a stem set in the kenzan toward oneself, the momentary hesitation when "subtracting" the excess from a finished work — such things come into focus only when you see the figure in motion.
If you find yourself wanting to touch, just a little more, this person and the air of this place — go straight on to the Behind the Scenes film that follows.